Colorado’s education system is like a “perfumed pig”

When I read about the new Colorado legislative initiative to throw an extra billion dollars at our state’s education system, I thought it would be more useful to do something else with the money if it had to be spent. Anything, even a handwarming bonfire in a large parking lot before a Broncos game, would be a more beneficial use than adding funding to a broken and abysmally performing school system.[1]

This strategy has been in vogue for decades and has not helped the kids at all. It has helped educators and all of those tied to the money that flows into education; the ed schools, the book and program vendors, and the politicians who pander to the education crowd to get campaign contributions and other support.

A superintendent of one of the largest school districts in Colorado told me almost 10 years ago when asked why the system served our kids so poorly, “You don’t understand. Education is run to benefit the adults who work here, not the kids.” And, tragically, that sums it up very well.

Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, commented in “Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?” that if we decided to become average in the world education competition we would have to improve dramatically. He quipped, can you imagine a football coach telling his team at the beginning of fall practice, “Let’s go out there and be average for the Gipper.”

He also asserted that it didn’t matter how a school district compared to other districts in the state, only how they compared to the global competition. The within the state comparison is favored by educators where the standards are set by the state to be a low hurdle to jump. Augustine concludes there is little consolation to being among the best of the poor.

When you look at the track record of results of all the billions thrown at our schools versus any improvement, it turns your stomach. The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report (November 2005) commented that in spite of all the money spent, the problem was worse than when Robert Kennedy called the gap a stain on our national honor. While you can see tiny “improvements” bragged about, they are cherry picked examples and often relate to cohort variability and other non-operational issues.

They also are such that if sustained it would take decades to solve the gap problem in the state and that would still leave us with a huge deficit to our global competition. Our educators are stuck in a rut of being unable to do anything but trying to do the wrong thing better. That is, our education system is different than that of ALL of the countries who are doing better than we are.

Our system doesn’t work, but millions of educators are brainwashed by education schools that our way is the only way; hence all of the reforms that try to improve things haven’t worked and can’t work because they are trying to improve a flawed system. In the vernacular of car restorers, we have a “perfumed pig.” That is, it looks pretty but the underlying chassis is flawed and the car won’t perform.

The only way to address this insanity is to educate the electorate to the real problems and elect “leaders” who can make tough decisions based on reality and that will actually put us on the road to real improvement in our education performance.
Paul Richardson is an electrical engineer.